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Sunday, 9 March 2014

The Procrastinator (some) Times Sunday 9th of March Edition

EDITORIAL

In this editorial I want to share with you how hard is keep covering an ongoing crisis. I know. It's logical, but I have never tried to do it before. I manage to keep following Venezuela mainly because is my country and I understand what is happening. With Ukraine, it's a lot harder. I'll keep posting the links that I find more interesting and explicative. Hope someone finds it useful. And I also hope this Cold War finishes soon, this time for good. (Have a look at Jean Jullien's Cold War II illustration).

In our Culture & Entertainment section we have cool articles from some of our favorite writes from The Atlantic and The New Yorker, about selfies in Crimea and HBO's True Detective. In Photoautomat, the second post about war photographer Tim Hetherington. In Science, news about the orgasm machine, of course. In Design & Business an RSA article about the Power of Create. And finally In Dog We Trust introduce us to the lovely Fred the pug.

Happy Sunday and happy reading.

PS: Sorry for the broken links early today, it's all been fixed now.

NEWS

Photo via Quartz.

The Venezuelan situation keeps unfolding towards I don't know exactly
where. The government won't stop insulting and repressing the opposition, and
reinforcing fallacies that then people and international media keep
replicating. The economic war; there is no other economic war than the
one they are leading against their own country (watch Rafael Ramírez admit not to have had a plan for oil income, ever).

Nor Panamá neither Jared Leto words are prove that the US is leading a slow coup d'etat. If the US was the enemy I guess that as energetically as
we broke diplomatic links with Panamá we would have stop selling
them oil. But we haven't, and we won't. They don't have proves, they
never show any prove to back up their statements.

The
opposition is not a small group, and the great majority are not rich,
posh,
right-wing people; right now a university professor in Venezuela earns
around US$
180,00/month according to the black market rate (the one that sets the
prices of every consumer good). That's Venezuelan "middle class". The
use of black and white terms is a great way to fill with
simplifications, prejudgements and distortions, a very complex
situation, and they know it. They sell themselves, as a
socialist-left-wing-Robin-Hood utopia, when
all they are is
just good old (and dramatically inefficient) Latin American populist
government with a strong like for totalitarianism and an insane
personality
cult. Absolutely corrupted by their absolute
power.

People often talk about about how the rate of
extreme poverty decrease in Venezuela, but actually they
only managed to take some people out of extreme poverty by giving them
some spare money coming from our oil incomes. Not opportunities or
education. Just cheap, bad quality, houses,
washing machines and TVs, propaganda and slogans. The greatest gift
from the government to "the people" is dependence. They strangled the
economy, make private industries go bankrupt by not letting them change
dollars, so more people keep depending on the government, and their
"generosity". A couple of weeks ago the Minister
of Education said that it was not in the interest of the government to
take people out of poverty to make them become opposition.

I
believe in socialism, Norwegian style. I subscribe the words of that
Colombian major who said that a prosperous country was not one where
"the poor have cars, but where the rich use public transportation".
Public services for all, food for all, medicines for all, and respect.
Respect for our lives, our opinions and our dreams. That is all we ask
for. Being the country with the biggest reserves of oil of the world
shouldn't be our curse, should be our blessing! We could be so great!

But
we are not. And that is a fact. Philip K. Dick has a great phrase about
reality, he says that "reality is that which, when you stop believing
in it, doesn’t go away.” And you can have the ideology you prefer, the
world is big enough, I don't mind, but the reality is that in Venezuela
there is no food, no medicines, no freedom, no peace, no happy
socialism. In Venezuela there is death, there is fear, there is armed
paramilitary, there is violence of all sorts, and there is torture (even if the Human Rights Ombudswoman wants to twist the universal definition). And whether you stop believing or not, is not going away.

That
is why one of the most relevant news from this week is not necessarily
about the ongoing protests, but about one of our major crisis: being one
of the most dangerous country on earth. Roberto Ferdman in Quartz
writes: There have already been almost 3000 murders in Venezuela since the start of the year. "In the first two months of 2014 (link
in Spanish) 2,841 people were murdered, a more than 10% jump from the
same period last year, when 2,576 murders were registered. Homicides
have grown almost systematically of late in Venezuela. Last year nearly
25,000 people were murdered, or almost 70 people per day. Murders are up
89% since 2010, and almost 500% since 1997, before Hugo Chavez became
president (in 1999)."

Only 9% of the crimes in
Venezuela are prosecuted and punished.
But in the past month there has been around a 1300 students arrested.
There is an image going around in social media that says that if we make
a minute of silence for every Venezuelan killed last year we would have
to be silent for 17 days.